Enclosure, Creenkill More, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
What catches the eye at Creenkill More is the way nature and human effort seem to have conspired, then blurred together.
Sitting just above the floor of a small east-west valley in County Kilkenny, a roughly circular raised platform, about 45 metres across at its widest, is ringed by a low earthen bank. That much sounds straightforward enough. But at the centre of the enclosure, a natural hillock pushes upward, and from its summit a spine of exposed rock protrudes, running northeast to southwest across the interior. The result is something quietly ambiguous: a constructed boundary embracing a feature that was already there, the earthwork and the geology folded into a single form.
Enclosures of this kind are a familiar presence in the Irish landscape, typically interpreted as early medieval farmsteads or settlement sites, sometimes called ring forts or raths, though the term enclosure is used when function and date remain uncertain. What makes the Creenkill More example worth pausing over is precisely that uncertainty, sharpened by the way the builders appear to have incorporated an existing geological feature rather than levelled or ignored it. The bank itself is modest, roughly two metres wide, rising no more than a metre and a half on the exterior and considerably less on the interior side, with no trace of a fosse, the external ditch that commonly accompanies such earthworks. At the eastern side, there is a possible entrance around three metres wide, though it may simply mark where the bank has worn away more than elsewhere over the centuries.